Yesterday I met a beautiful man who spoke about men and love. Most of what he spoke resonated, moved and inspired me. A few things unsettled and disturbed me. This is my attempt to expand on the bits that left me unsettled.
He started the talk introducing all of us as ‘toxic males’, and ended with the same message. This was said with humour (possibly tongue-in-cheek) and as a passing reference, but it unsettled me for a few reasons.
I feel like we need to dive into our toxic maleness if we are to understand what it means to be male, and to help with the ‘toxicity’. It’s not enough – in fact it’s dangerous in my view – to make passing reference to it, as some kind of shared ‘known but unspoken’ theme. A kind of ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’. We keep doing this, and it’s not working. The undercurrents continue; the toxic river festers.
I don’t know what it means to dive into this. It feels scary and unknown. But I notice a difference when we do this well, or do it poorly. Here’s an example: A few months ago I sat in a circle with men of all ages where we were asked to talk about violence.
Before the circle started, I was ready to enter some intellectual debate about what I think needs to happen – what I think about it all. To basically crap on about a wider issue that I know little about. I felt fired up, but I was awash with words and poorly-thought-through ideas. It was all brain and no heart. All out there and not known or felt or within me.
The first man spoke. A young man. I looked at him, and thought he might speak about his pain at being labelled a ‘toxic man’ and getting lumped with all the other ‘bad men’ out there. Instead, he spoke gently about his own challenges with subtle violence. How he felt he had applied pressure on his girlfriend in ways he regrets, how he had spoken poorly to her, and ways in which he hadn’t shown her full respect. I was completely disarmed, and moved quickly from my head to my heart. By the end of the circle, an Elder spoke – a gentle man from a long-term relationship – and he talked of his regret at what he now considered his form of violence: how he pulled away from his wife at times – through his work; his activism and his emotional withdrawal – when she needed him.
It was breathtaking, tender and raw to hear these men speak. It made me look inside; slow down and stop conjecturing and start feeling and listening. It feels like these are some of the things we need.
Through Rites of Passage, we work with men of all ages, but a big focus is on teenagers becoming men. So later in this talk, after so many rich and wondrous things had been spoken about men and love, somebody asked this expert: how can we bring this to the teenage boys? He sat back slightly, and answered: “I wouldn’t. I would work with teenage girls but teenage boys will not cope with this.” He then went on to speak of teenage boys who are ‘damaged’ by pornography use, and labelled these boys as ‘troglodytes’ who couldn’t be worked with in these rich ways. The only answer was to send them out to the wilderness, to have some reckoning; to live life and then somehow reach some wisdom, where they would – finally – be able to start to be taught some real lessons of understanding masculinity, femininity and how to love well.
One of our men called him out on this, since these are the young people we strive to work with – these ‘damaged’ teenage boys. These are the ones we want to help; to transition; to move away from ‘toxic masculinity’ and towards ‘healthy masculinity’ and an understanding of their own healthy femininity too. We don’t want to wait.
If we label people as ‘too damaged’ to work with, are we also relegating parts of ourselves as ‘too damaged’ to heal? If we have to wait until people are ready, are we forever waiting and stalling the hard work? The now work? Meeting someone and seeing someone where they are; as they are?
To tackle some of the hardest work, I feel like we need to witness; uncover and speak the shadows and the darkness: the hardest; the yukkiest; the most shameful bits. And to help uncover and witness others’ shadows and darkness – to move towards a place where these festering things can be aired and examined; held to account and at times painfully and wondrously released – it feels to me that we need to uncover and speak – strongly and truthfully – our own shadows and darkness.
Love from Step xx